My uncle thinks fractals are incredibly stupid.
I am somewhat distressed by this, but it's understandable. He's lived in Silicon Valley since he was at Stanford in (I think) the mid-'70s. He was therefore perfectly placed to be right in the middle of the grooviest, most psychedelic, overwhelming onslaught of fractals that ever happened anywhere. He's a guy who really understands about beautifully-crafted things that have been made by skilled human hands, and is quite rightly suspicious about crude bright show-offy art spit out of a computer.
So I find myself wondering, would it be at all possible to interest someone like my uncle in the kinds of pictures I've been making? Or is it simply foolish of me to even consider it? For that matter, I'm still struggling to reconcile my own fondness for archaic mechanical technologies (like letterpress printing) with my continuing interest in all this pixelated mathematics.
It has given me some new, possibly difficult things to think about. Who is my audience, really? What might they like, besides fractals?
Here's a spiral with Spirograph patterns. It's either festively pensive, or pensively festive, and it suits my present mood.
untitled [traditional spirograph julia]
2 comments:
Surely your uncle can see that you are an artist--maybe working in a medium he doesn't think much of--but you have a great sense of composition!
Thank you!
I think it's possible that my uncle might like a few of the things I've done, and that his dislike of fractals may be a lot to do with having been bored by psychedelic Californians. And he definitely gets a big thumbs-up for acknowledging the existence of art and artists at all, since most of the rest of my family put artists in the same category as sparkly unicorns: imaginary, and also kind of embarrassing.
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